Google Adwords owes its popularity among digital marketers to its myriad features. One such feature is ad extensions. Ad extensions allow users to add pertinent information about their business to a google ad. Adwords offers a variety of extensions, such as review extensions, sitelink extensions, callout extensions, and location extensions. This article aims to elaborate on two of these available extensions: sitelinks and callout extensions.
How Are Sitelinks and Callouts Different from Each Other?
Most people presume that sitelinks and callout extensions are actually the same things. The fact that both sitelinks and callout extensions are texts that can be added to google ads appearing at the top of a search page may have something to do with this confusion. However, these two extensions are very different from each other and serve different purposes.
While callout extensions are actually just descriptive text, sitelinks are clickable and include a link to a specific page (as is also apparent from the name). Also, since sitelinks include a link, they appear in color blue, whereas callout extensions appear as just plain grey text.
Why Are Sitelinks Not an Ideal Option for B2B Businesses?
With sitelinks comes a hidden clause — the link added to a sitelink must not be the link to the advertiser’s target URL. For instance, if you are a shoe retailer, the link provided in the sitelink must not be the link to your landing page for shoes. You could add sitelinks to a different page. For instance, a link to the page that outlines the different accessories you sell. Advertisers can also create sitelinks for various promotions or deals. This is one of the most important reasons why sitelinks are not a potent feature for B2B businesses. Most B2B businesses operate with only one landing page and in such a case, creating sitelinks becomes problematic.
It’s important to decide how and when you want to use sitelinks. Creating sitelinks to pages that won’t serve any purpose is useless since, in the digital marketing world, one must pay for every click. In such a scenario, sending a potential client to a page that will not help you convert them won’t serve any purpose.
Are Callout Extensions a Better Option for B2B Businesses?
For B2B advertisers, callouts are a better option. Callouts can be effectively used to add powerful slogans or taglines, provide information about different products or a business, or add any other information that might help businesses convert potential customers. Callout extensions also allow marketers to avail extra space, thereby allowing them to add more goal-oriented text.
However, callouts should be used smartly. For instance, asking a potential client to register with your website using a callout extension is useless as callouts do not use any links and thus, the client will be at a loss for where to go to register. This not only leads to a bad user experience but also a wasted opportunity. An important thing to remember is that callouts are limited to only 25 characters. Thus, one must use them effectively to convey as much information as possible in only a few words.
What Are Your Thoughts?
We would love to hear how you use callouts and sitelinks to increase traffic on your website and which of the two is your favorite.